


closest thing to heaven

by 127AM (hotmess_ex_press)



Category: NCT (Band), WAYV
Genre: Immortality, Loneliness, Love as Salvation, M/M, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Vampires, the painful and moral-questioning shift into immortality!, waxing poetic abt ten is my favorite hobby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:40:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27219535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotmess_ex_press/pseuds/127AM
Summary: Ten looks back at him, obsidian hair a crown of crashing waves above a marble face, and he's laughing, laughing because he can't cry, it's been centuries and he's forgotten how. And he's beautiful, damned and divine and divine and damned.He's crooning to Yukhei,hunt with me, hunt with me, but he's lived through too many lonely centuries and scarlet nights and it sounds more likesave me, save me, save me, a kiss and a prayer dissolved into each rush of everflowing blood through his veins.
Relationships: Chittaphon Leechaiyapornkul | Ten/Wong Yuk Hei | Lucas
Comments: 5
Kudos: 30





	closest thing to heaven

**Author's Note:**

> tw for some discussion of religion and scenes with blood and death!  
> if those bother you, the graphic scene i'd recommend you skip over begins at "ten stills, so close yukhei can hear his heart" and ends along with the section. (resume reading at "for a week...")
> 
> hope you enjoy!

Yukhei doesn't know how many years he wastes reeling through the streets, hungry and drunk, pouring liquor down his throat like it will drown the fever in his veins, like it will caress that ache in his teeth and leave him sated one more day. He thought he could burn it away, burn away the thirst and live, _live_ , again. If he could only last a little longer than the evil clenching in his veins, smolder a little slower, a little cleaner.

But it's been years. So many years, and every pretty girl is a cross, wicked and warm and pink-gummed. So many years, collapsing in on themselves, time rotting away from Yukhei's soul like sweet fruit bowing from a gnarled tree. So many years, and Yukhei's veins are running dry, meat dripping from his bones.

They catch him again, whisk him from the streets and slam him across the walls of a gritty cell.

Moonlight sears where it once soothed. Yukhei curls away from it, letting it splash cold and biting against the floor instead.

The bars of his cell used to melt and snarl beneath Yukhei's hands; traces of his rage still grip the metal, twisted in the shape of hunger.

But it's been years, and Yukhei can barely lift his arms to cover his face.

It's been years, and Yukhei tastes bone. His heart is stilling, too quiet in his chest, crawling towards his throat, greedy for blood. _Shhh_ , he croons to himself, voice a shred of silk. _Shhh..._

He thought he could live through it, the sear and scream and ache. But he is so weak, vision bleeding dark red and lost under the cruel sunlight, and the thirst simmers forever.

A new scent swirls through the walls of his cell tonight--something wild and ancient, claws-deep on a current of heady, rich perfume. Blood so thick, so sweet that Yukhei's mouth spills open, tongue curling in the air. His barren veins groan with need.

On hands and knees he follows the scent as it slinks away from outside his wall, leaving a wake like sizzling sin. His palms press to the rough walls, cutting deep as he slides down, crumbling to the floor again.

He presses his hands to his mouth, tongue working into his skin, but the gashes are cold and bloodless.

He folds further in on himself, desperately drinking at nothing.

His vision goes black, then blinding white as the scent floods into the station, crashing into every wall, piercing each crevice of the cell. Yukhei gasps, and each breath is ripe, dense as blood.

His hearing sharpens as nails drag along plaster, then fall away to dance across the lip of a computer. He smells fear rising from each officer at the jail, as if even they can taste the border of centuries, the curtain of power in this stranger's smile.

Yukhei inhales, lungs to the swell of collapsing.

A voice, slick like ruby edges, cuts through the tight silence. "I'm here for him."

His cuts flush, the palest of pinks.

The guard at the desk speaks nervously. "He's been in and out of here for almost thirty years."

"Oh, yes," the voice hums, laughter like chiffon. Fingertips softly scrape dust from the desk. Velvet whispers as he shifts. "It's taken me a while to get here, hasn't it?"

Heels click across the tile towards Yukhei. His long-dormant heart pangs, that sultry scent solidifying in his chest. A worker scrambles to unlock the door.

Yukhei's gaze slips on the curve of sharp black boots, glides along dark silk and is snared on a hand heavy with silver rings and sleek tattoos, light catching on a hundred opals and garnets.

The officer, jumpy. "Sir..."

"He's mine," the owner of the hand dripping in jewels hisses, and the blood in the air goes cold. The officer skitters away.

The boots take slow, sure steps forward. In the half-light, Yukhei can make out shimmering serpents etched into the heels, spiraled and writhing. The man kneels and yanks the iron cross from Yukhei's neck with a hiss, letting it clatter across the floor. He crooks a finger beneath Yukhei's chin, tilting his head towards him, towards the fluorescent lights.

Yukhei sees white, sees the edges of an angel with hair like pitch and the knife-glint of a smile before the touch on his chin arcs to grip his neck and a hand slithers over his eyes and lips like fresh meat slice against his.

The man's smile is alive and saturated, laced in a cocktail of luxurious blood. A drop tumbles down the steep pillar of Yukhei's neck, another fractures across his bottom lip, splintering into every channel.

The craving in Yukhei's veins ignites with a new fury, and he cries out. His spine crawls with fire and he arches up, nerves raw and ringing as he blindly lurches, coils into the man's mouth, his life-stained lips.

He licks into that cloying mouth, drunken and lascivious, decadence welling rose-red between their lips. Groaning low and long and carnal, he wrings the blood from between each tooth, coaxes it from every silken-hot crevice.

When warmth trickles into the crooks of his palms he goes boneless, feeling each drop of red cascading against his skin. And still his gums seethe, esurient.

The man laughs again, fuller this time, opulent. He kisses blood from Yukhei's chin, unhurried. His hand never moves away from Yukhei's eyes.

"Don't look, love," he murmurs, crushing Yukhei into his arms like he's air and petal-matter. He sweeps out of the station between lightning-flash heartbeats, and the moonlight is soft and graceful once again. Night teases kisses of air beneath Yukhei's eyelids, drawing out tears, perfect globes of crimson.

Yukhei feels asphalt beneath his feet, arms unfolding around him and leaving him quivering. He stumbles back, eyes flicking open.

A face like molten silver smirks back in the moonglow. Lips still scarlet, tender cuts against a marble face. His hair flashes new-moon deep, and starlight worships every inch of him, holy under midnight's secret-woven spell. Every thread of his skin, every sigh of his movements, sings with something ages-immeasurable and hypnotizing, a heart-shattering sort of divine. He ripples towards Yukhei, onyx eyes cut through with plasma and radiating an unearthly diamond light of their own.

Yukhei dips to his knees, head falling forward and ravenous hands reaching for the man through the chasmic dark. He wants to plead, wants to pray, wants to be devoured by the beauty winding in his eyes. Wants to carve out his soul and watch as the man lets it fragment across his lips, brutal and breathtaking. "God," he moans, desolate, " _god_."

Another laugh, settling in Yukhei's stomach like famine. He sinks and pulls Yukhei's hands to his chest, silk knees right to the graveled concrete. His fingertips snake beneath Yukhei's shirt, thumbing across his ribs like the pages of a beloved tome, lazy and possessive.

"I'm Ten," he whispers. A raucous group is turning the corner, skirting closer to the mouth of the alley they're in. They are warm, and drunk, and so _alive_ , and Yukhei's jaw hinges, head tipping back. Ten's eyes glint even brighter, whetted on Yukhei's bloodlust. "And you, sweetness, are _starved_."

Yukhei lunges, tears, _drinks_. Scrapes every drop from its cradle of bone, swallows screams as they bubble into sobs and whimpers as they disintegrate into shaking exhales, cleaves bone from bone and licks up the marrow. He wears gloves of glistening crimson as he finally falls away, tumbling back into the shadows of the alley.

He stares out at the carnage laid like shattered roses at the yawn of the alley. Too much blood roils in his stomach, slow sweet pink crawling across his cheeks, his fingertips, the back of his neck. He feels it lap against the walls of his veins, waves drawn and released by the sticky drumbeat of his heart. On instinct, he flings the air from his lungs to find that he doesn't need it. His heart pummels on, a beast of its own, too tight and wanton in Yukhei's skin.

He drags his hands down his face.

Across the alley, a fluttering noise of delight curls out of Ten's crooked smile. "Wild thing," he breathes, edging adoration. He slinks forward, a husk of lightning, pulling through Yukhei's hair and licking blood from the corner of his eye. Smooth and cool--his tongue, his touch, his admiration. Yukhei is dwarfed by the eternity of him. "Beautiful thing."

Yukhei shudders, feeling more monster than man.

Ten harbors him closer, whispers once again, _don't look._ He twirls through the city on a swift current of starlight; they are a pearl of moonlight smeared on the wind, spiderwebs whipped across the street.

He alights on the elegant spindle of a balcony, and Yukhei slips from his arms to the alabaster floor, hands still tangled in Ten's.

Ten leaves him spilled over the balcony, lace curtains swallowing him into a smoky, candlelit room.

As the sky runs violent with fuchsia and bronze, Yukhei breathes and breathes. Air dips into the cavities of his chest and slams away again, unchanged. He inhales quicker but his pulse dances on, infinite and teasing and too-loud. Beneath the cracked blood-spun pelt, ash flickers low under his skin, festering in the scant tug of daybreak.

"Come inside," Ten commands. Yukhei whips around--Ten has exchanged his boots for bare feet, his ankles slim and wrapped like sacrifices in strands of pale gold. Whispers of dawn on the horizon, he conceals himself in the filigreed drapes, half shadow and half relief. They billow around him, the tattered wings of an angel. Yukhei feels his worship rising heavy in his throat. "I'll clean you up. The sun will rise soon."

Where Yukhei's cross had bit and raged, welts have risen up in Ten's palm. His hand contorts and clenches when he reaches out, strands of lucid morning lapping at his ivory skin.

Yukhei envelops it with his own, stark flesh delicate but stone-slick and unyielding. He lets himself be swayed forward as the first lashes of dawn hiss over the horizon. Ten swirls the curtains closed behind them, quick to coalesce into the impenetrable darkness in the edges of the room.

The room--open, vast but so small in the waltzing light of a thousand tapered candles, the only gleam in the room save for the shreds of sunlight that escape the grasp of the lacy curtains, save for the beacons of Ten's gaze. Every sleek mahogany surface is draped in jewels and velvet and white wax, carelessly strewn with goblets of intricate silver and stale cigarettes and crystalline bottles spinning half-full with rose petals and cologne. A bed fit for a king, raised in the center of the room and veiled in red brocade and endless strands of glistening pearls.

Red brocade and pearls and sumptuous silk, feather pillows so cold Yukhei can feel them from across the room.

The air is thick, choking with smoke and perfume and streaming blood. Most potent pulsing from the cut of Ten's throat.

"Come." Ten leads him with two fingers dipped into the small of his back. The bathroom door has been torn away, replaced with a million starlight threads of silver beads. Steam already pours from the claw footed bath. Ten throws a dragon-embroidered robe over the mirror, swivels to watch with reckless fascination as Yukhei undresses.

The water is scalding but Yukhei dissolves into it anyway, pools beneath the surface and breathes until each inhale and exhale is equal parts water. His heart thrashes on. Water stirs in and out of his lungs.

The bath goes cool. Ten is there when he finally pierces through the surface, rose oil between his fingers as he massages them through Yukhei's hair.

"You'll forget, soon," he reassures. Yukhei wishes he hadn't masked the mirror at the foot of the tub, wishes he could search Ten's face, the brutal planes of it, for anything close to comfort. His voice drips down Yukhei's spine, a paradox of blazing softness.

"What?" Yukhei asks, small. Ten's hands wander to the base of his throat, one nail scraping down to circle the hidden cavern between ribs.

"How to breathe."

The water is ice now, pink as it scrabbles at the porcelain containing it. Yukhei's head strikes heavy against the wide rim. Another cruel scarlet tear twists from his eye and fades against his cheek. Ten's cold finger carves along its trail.

"You'll forget this, too." His voice is bittersweet beneath its film of intimacy, its hush and opacity.

Yukhei trembles, twitches to reach for Ten, but he's cold and it's been nearly thirty years since he was full, thirty years of ache and insanity and he doesn't remember how. Thirty years of waiting to be saved and Ten is so near but Yukhei doesn't think he deserves salvation anymore. Lovely and damned, Ten leans close and presses a petal of a kiss to Yukhei's forehead.

"The bed is big," Ten says. "If you'd like to join me."

The beads quiver and sing as he brushes through them. Yukhei drowns without death in the frigid bath all day, until hunger stirs at the first lick of dusk.

Ten hunts with an animal's glee, a monster's grace. His eyes go silver and hollow, not a fleck of black, not a shadow of the soul he might have had, once.

Some nights he plunges through the ink of midnight, a winnowing blade and a gaping jaw. He empties pulses into his cavernous smile while Yukhei waits, tilted over the balcony all night, thirst hurling itself at the confines of his gullet. Ten pricks like a shard of moonlight on the winding balcony railing as the sky bruises, greeting Yukhei with a scorching feast of a kiss. Blood cascades from the ridge of each tooth as Yukhei whispers prayers into his mouth, his wretched tongue burning too beautiful and too lush.

Other nights, he spins through a mist of perfume and undoes the buttons that glisten against fluid silk, pleats himself enticing and sanguine against crumbling alley mouths and cajoles throats out with glassy teeth.

A long-untouched part of Yukhei craves to be his enchanted prey. He'll hew a glance of Ten, the red smoke flickering from obsidian-bleeding-grey eyes, the brittle elegance of a dozen trilling bracelets dancing on slim wrists. He'll glance and he'll glance away and he'll _want_ , jealousy clawing low in his bones as he thinks of every happy victim. Every lucky, delicate body strung against a brick wall and snapped into order by Ten's flowing, ruthless fingers. The way he'd open beneath Ten's knife-hot canines, the way he'd shudder and buckle as pleasure bled into pain bled into Ten. His heart a tide of rushing carmine, tearing through the seams of Ten's veins.

His life, circling slow and decadent through Ten's marble-cold body, forever.

The nights Yukhei hates the most are the ones when Ten's neck stretches long with laughter, gaze aflame as he lures his meals home, careens into that gorgeous bed and feeds for hours, time a pulled thread, a cello string plucked neat and haunting beneath his hands. Flashes fang and traces satin tongue and pulsates slow sweet love until everything is red and writhing: the blood and shadow distorting each contour of his prey's pleasure, the eddying rifts of the bed's silks as they swirl to encompass Ten and his sighing, dying lover.

Yukhei thinks that these are the nights when he is the least human.

Sometimes he never makes it to the bed, just glides onto one of the dusty rose lounges and rocks as he drinks, spine a harsh edge of broken glass as it curls around the warm body caged in his diamond grip.

He'll wrench away and lick his teeth. Garnet to tourmaline to shining pearl.

With a languid flex of his finger, he'll gouge a tap from a loose wrist, drain the last of its honeyed warmth into a goblet.

"Drink, Yukhei," he'll order, and if a human man drunk as deeply, lusted with half as much destruction, he would be heaving, wailing, scrambling into insanity. But Ten's pale chest is statue, outstretched hand unwavering. Eyes still platinum the whole way through. "You need to drink."

Yukhei's lungs still undulate with the habit of breathing, grip wobbling like dove wings when he lifts the cup to his paper-dry lips.

Gaze clouding with something feral and unspeakable when he watches Yukhei, Ten will purr, _good_.

Tonight, Ten hums strange and lilting as his fingertips trip over vials and crystal-lipped jars, haphazard on the stained tray beneath his favorite mirror.

Candlelight licks trance-like over his cheekbones. Yukhei's fear is a second heart, throbbing beneath his tongue.

Ten sees him in the curve of the mirror, a smirk toying with the corners of his lips, distorting into a mirthful grin when Yukhei bows to murmur a kiss over the clasp of his necklace. The clasp and his skin are equal in ice, equal in steel.

Ten's teeth are sharp, too pointed for the force of years, the flow of souls that have run themselves ragged over those perfect spades.

Yukhei loops fingertips down to the curve of Ten's elbow, tugs him to one of the lolling chaise lounges. Can't bear to watch as Ten pools velvety across the arm of the sofa, features tilting with amusement when Yukhei sifts through the vials and returns with a handful clutched between ribs.

"Oh, sweetness," Ten laughs softly when Yukhei spills across his lap, grip a chain around Yukhei's waist. "What are you planning?"

Angling Ten's face with a gentle hold on his jaw, Yukhei smiles ghostly and sets to wobbling work. Scarlet smudged beneath Ten's eyes, a feline flick of silver from the corners. Starlight misted over the sweep of his cheekbones, trickling down to kiss his collarbones. Yukhei lingers on the sweep of jutting bone and it's unnerving: nestled in the stretches of skin that would make a man's breath snare, all he receives from Ten is a furl of teeth, a faint stroke up the snap of his back.

He paints Ten's lips the color of nightshade, beading a drop of the dye on his own lips and letting it bleed.

In one divot of Ten's neck, he cuts a cloud of perfume, on the other side he presses his lips to the cavity where a pulse should tease beneath the skin. It's the scent that dragged him across the walls of his cell all that time ago, and he swears his heart swells and crumples between moments.

"Must you hunt tonight?" he whispers, and wonders how cold his breath is as it smooths over Ten's skin.

Ten drags Yukhei's shirt up his spine, each caress between ribs a bitter accusation. "I'm hungry," he replies, easy and chilled.

Yukhei presses closer, jaw grinding against Ten's shoulder. "Must you kill?"

"Your hunger is young." Sliding touch, flicking between bones. "It may let you starve, but mine knows no such pleasure. Too many centuries, and it's grown insatiable."

Yukhei jerks away, so Ten can't feel the shiver that pricks up the back of his neck.

"Let's do something fun tonight," Ten suggests, a beast rising in the well-worn groove of his smile.

He takes Yukhei to the opera, and after the show steals between shadows to visit the lead performer in her powder-pink dressing room. The black bow around her neck slides perfectly over the puncture wounds, and the scent of her is lovely, light and bubbling like a summer evening. Yukhei watches Ten arrange her pretty, pale limbs like a crooked doll before her vanity. That ribbon at her neck like the sweet tie of a gift, an offering.

Every day, Ten sleeps. Unfathomably.

He sleeps with the weight of centuries pinning each bone to the bed. His visage is that of an angel's when slumber curtains his eyes and pulls his lips closed over his teeth, hands bent to his chest as if in prayer. Gloves of whirling tattoos stark against that unmarred ivory torso.

He rests in the center of the bed, silk dipping around his waist, but leaves a ripple in the pillows where Yukhei would fit perfectly, swathed half across the valley of Ten's side.

A space carved out every morning, without fail. A temptation.

Every morning Yukhei wakes from fitful half-human sleep, still tempered by the sun. He tiptoes around the slashes of wavering daylight slopped across the room, flooding past the stretched shadows of the lacy drapes. Pearls rustle beneath his touch as he cleaves a slit in the curtains, peers past them to study the velvet lull of Ten's sleeping form.

He could be a corpse--ice and stone--if it weren't for the serenity of him, that easiness about the joints.

Ten is a flower. Bloodred, sweeter than sin, bloomed to the curve of bursting. Frozen forever in immortal beauty, caught on the precipice of youth. Rotting from within.

It would be easy to lose himself in the cherry-lush crests of the bed, find himself coiling into Ten's embrace, damned forever. His chest peeling open, decay sinking swiftly to his soul from the silken insistence of Ten's mouth.

A twitch of his fingers, and the swishing pearls obscure the bed once again.

Yukhei crumples against the arm of a fainting couch, holds himself as his stomach reels in and out of itself, pounding against his skin. He stares at the strains of sunlight dancing across the room until his tongue is coated in smoke, and it tastes like salvation.

The waning moon is brittle, hard and pale, a sickle in the cloudless sky.

Tonight, Ten's eyes are pools of roiling entrancement, the moon's missing gibbous rising in his gaze.

He knocks before he enters, a mockery of respect. "Yukhei," he sings, dangling half across the threshold. "I brought you a present."

Yukhei smells her before he sees her; cloying young blood, bitter around the edges. Poison bursting through her veins, wine and liquor and something a little slower, a little sicker. She laughs as Ten yanks her inside, his nails arching into the rhythm at her wrist. Yukhei trips over the steps to the bed in his haste to jolt away, clinging to the bedpost at his back. He moans helplessly at the air clotting with her quick blood droplets, and Ten's grin is slippery, expanding like smoke.

Her ankles are clumsy as Ten leads her to a crushed velvet loveseat. She giggles as Ten kneels at her feet and unlaces the glossy ribbons at her ankles; she tilts her chin up like a queen, too far gone to see that the bloodstains spilt over the cushions aren't flushed red roses, to recognize the hunger in Ten's teeth as something less like longing and more like craving, glinting with a sin far more carnal than lust.

When he rises and settles beside her, she slithers against his chest, nails stroking down the silk of his lapels. Looking at Yukhei with artificial want echoing in her blown pupils. She is striking, pomegranate lips full and parted coyly, a tumble of black curls tossed across her shoulders, warm brown skin kissed by bronze. Gorgeous, the way every man's first wet dream and last meal should be. The way that slicks up canines swift and sugared.

Yukhei stares at her, the doom dancing in her arteries. Dead and alive, dead and alive in Ten's tightening arms.

Ten scrapes curls from the gold-carved sweep of her jaw, one finger flirting with the coagulated weight of her pulse. "Well, Yukhei?" his voice dips into a midnight husk. "Won't you come say hello?"

A thread of pearls explodes beneath Yukhei's grip. Each one mirrored in his soul as they crash to the floor, another pull in its ash armor. He wants to bend in on himself, dissolve into a thousand of those scattered pearls.

"No," he chokes, " _no_ , what are you--why are you doing this?"

The pearls meander to every slope of the room. Ten stops one with a dainty touch of his serpent-carved boots. He gazes at it a moment, then jerks his head towards Yukhei again. A wave of black is washed away as quickly as it appears in his eyes, and Yukhei forgets to stop breathing.

Air seeps right through him, his evaporating skin.

"You're wasting away again," Ten hisses. The girl is nuzzling into the lifelessness of his neck, smiling vaguely. "Just come eat. _Properly_."

Yukhei's hands fall away from where they've been fisted around the bedpost, knotted in pearls. "No," he repeats, shaking like goodness, wavering like a child's heartbeat. "I won't."

Ten curses, tears away from the girl. She slumps, mouthing at nothing. He kicks at the pearls as he storms closer; they whirl like seafoam away from him, his dizzying rage and terrible beauty. "Why won't you _eat?_ " he growls. Eyes pure platinum. In the moonlight, the remnants of eyeliner melting down his cheeks shine like his pupils are boiling over, splashing harsh and metal against his skin. "You seemed to have no problem with it the night I saved you."

"Saved me?" Yukhei sobs. "You damned me!"

Ten stills, so close Yukhei can hear his heart. He is moonlight and ivory and emptiness, nothing but blood and teeth. Aching, glossy teeth.

Yukhei is fracturing from the inside, cracks pushing out from his soul to scratch at his chest. His veins are too dry to let him cry, but he heaves into the night regardless.

"You've damned me to hell."

There is silence, pristine, cruel. Then Ten laughs, a low, lovely, rich thing. Yukhei trembles at the nearness of it.

"You say I've damned you?" Ten asks without uncertainty, his voice a cold asp in his throat, straining to strike. "To what _hell?_ You are young and beautiful, forever."

He stalks closer, pearls collapsing into sighs of dust beneath his feet. Yukhei's hands fly to his throat, where a cross once rested, too many lifetimes ago. Ten's eyes are almost white.

"This," he slams a palm into Yukhei's chest, fingers twisting so deep skin and ribs bow beneath his touch, cutting too close to Yukhei's heart. His nose brushes Yukhei's chin with jeering tenderness as Yukhei gasps, strains to hold it in his lungs, gasps, but air couldn't save him. For the first time, his heart stumbles over its eternal melody. " _This_ is the only god you will ever know."

Ten shoves once more, hurls Yukhei to the foot of the bed. Clutching his chest, Yukhei feels his ribs crumble like dominoes against his lungs. Throbbing when he keeps panting, choking for anything resembling relief, anything resembling life.

A titanium knife flicks from Ten's cuff as he glides back to the loveseat, sweeping behind it and catching the girl around the neck, pressing her back into the cushions. Her eyes begin to clear, flickering with terror, deep and opaque. Her nails, so languid and seductive just minutes before, now scrabble uselessly at Ten's forearm. He pulls her in tighter, lips touching her forehead as the dull edge of the knife traces over the neckline of her dress, dipping between her breasts.

She whimpers, hands falling to the velvet seat, stiff with terror. Ten shifts the blade as he drags it upwards, the honed edge of it kissing her golden skin. A thin line of blood beads in its wake.

"And this," Ten whispers, knife skimming where her life runs the thickest, "is the closest to heaven you'll ever come."

The girl cries out as the blade slips softly beneath her skin, a warbling exhale of horror. Blood trickles down the shining blade, blurring her skin. Ten gently kisses her ear as he curls his wrist. The blood begins to flow darker. Another kiss, bestowed to the place metal meets flesh. The blade disappears. Blood gushes in earnest. Her small noises gurgle into crimson, painting her lips, slipping down her chin.

Ten rises. His tattoos burn red as the trail of blood that marks his path across the room. He kneels in front of Yukhei and presses the tip of the knife to his bottom lip.

"Drink," he says.

Lungs still contorting to breathe, Yukhei touches Ten's face. Fingertips sketching the petrifying lines of it, sluicing off of the droplets of blood suspended on his marble skin. Blood in the air gathers in the crease of Yukhei's eyes, dripping away as tears. Matching smudges, high on their cheekbones. The knife rattles to the floor.

Ten grasps Yukhei's jaw with desperate coldness. Moonlight shies away from him.

"I should have let you starve," he murmurs.

For a week, an immortal blink, Ten hunts quickly.

He comes home and drapes himself over the bed, shoes still on. Only on the right side of the bed, a pack of cigarettes and old ashtray teetering in the center.

Yukhei slumps on the stairs at the foot of the bed. He would cry if he could, and flinches every time Ten lights a match.

_Stop jumping._

_Aren't you flammable?_

_Like dried pine._

One morning, Ten falls asleep with his rings on. Yukhei kneels beside him and clutches those cold hands as he rolls each ring off.

He wakes with his hand buried between Ten's dead ones, gathered in the dip of Ten's chest, and a lapful of jewelry. Ten's head barely inclined his way, as if he was searching in his slumber.

"Do you hate your sire?" Yukhei asks, voice lashing into the night. Ten glances up, meeting his eye in the mirror. He is threading thin cuts of silver through his hair, but his hands lower at the question, hovering above the wax-stained vanity. Head weighing to the side, the hard line of his lips melts, lifts humorlessly.

"It's been so long." Shrapnels of starlight droop from his fingertips. "I don't remember him, let alone hate him."

Yukhei swallows. Mortal tic. "I loved mine."

Ten's eyebrow flicks up, then smooths again.

"She should have killed me."

"She let you starve." Face gutted of emotion, Ten picks at the gilded lid of a pot of kohl, nail carving at the gold lattice of it. The sound solidifies in Yukhei's spine as ice.

"She warped my soul." Yukhei closes his eyes, still sees her tainted grin. "She drained me in the street. I fasted for thirty years, trying to undo it."

"Thirty years," Ten repeats, tether of awe in his words. "I wouldn't have let you go hungry."

Yukhei's brow creases. "She should have killed me. But she left me there, damned."

Ten scoffs a laugh, straightening. He lifts the tip of a strand of silver, examining it as it turns through the candlelight, but doesn't move to twine it through his hair. "You and your damnation."

"You don't understand," Yukhei snaps. "You've never wanted to be holy."

Ten's head twitches upwards again, gaze snagging on Yukhei. "Human trait," he leers, but there's a shadow of dishonesty in the axis of his smile.

The glinting filigree in Ten's hair is snarled in candlelight, a stain of diamond glow that swirls down to his cheekbones, pearls across his chest. He is as close to divine as anything Yukhei has ever known, stirring Yukhei's veins the way the moon draws the tide. Desolate, so reverent.

"If you were human," Yukhei's throat clenches with something phantom and immovable, knuckles scorching white as he grips the cuffs of his shirt. "If we were human..."

Ten glances over his shoulder, eyes thick with an unknowable beauty, a sweetness distorted. His eyes are flowers cast in silver, his eyes are the reflection of the moon in storm-ravaged water.

He rises, serene. Feet like bluebells as he crosses the room.

Yukhei's head tips back against the lounge as Ten steps between his legs, a finger pooling at his clavicle. Ten's fingertips skim down his neck to ease open the buttons of his shirt, touch carefully curling down. A crown of bruises is still a faint stain around Yukhei's heart.

Ten's palm presses over the bruises, almost warm, almost in apology.

"If we were human," he whispers, so close that their hearts thrum in aching almost-harmony. "I would tell you that holiness is not mined from the soul."

His touch blooms across Yukhei's chest, and he sways forward. As if to drop a kiss to the cold pulsation of Yukhei's throat. As if thinking better of it.

"I would tell you that it is created in the heart."

Yukhei dreams in splashing technicolor, in splayed bruises and gently pried arteries.

He is tearing through the darkness, nothing but a shell of starshine. He is unshackled by his rotting cage of bones, he could slice forever through night's viscous kiss, the streets seeping with lightning where he hurtles against them.

That scent reels him in again, beckons him along. Perfume, sensual and rich, drizzled straight from its many-faceted vial into the hollow where generations course against alabaster skin.

Too far away, a pure white light throbs, flashing and ebbing into shadow. Yukhei spins faster, a rapier through the wind, but the light is bleeding into red and contorting, stretching too thin and dripping with holes like something hungry, something _alive_ , is swilling at the edges, clawing to rupture itself free.

Yukhei stretches, grabs with spectral hands, but the light shatters into ebony under his illusory touch and suddenly there is sky trickling with violet and cement beneath his feet and a _body_ , painfully mortal, thighs too heavy and too slow and slipping with poison as he tries to run as fast as he could once fly. His palms are empty and he's wailing deep from his lungs, something unsung and ancient and festering, and Ten is dancing ahead of him with his translucent shirt undone and caught like white flags of surrender around his elbows.

Ten looks back at him, obsidian hair a crown of crashing waves above a marble face, and he's laughing, laughing because he can't cry, it's been centuries and he's _forgotten_.

The sun scratches at the horizon but Ten isn't leading them home, he's darting down the cobbled streets that lead to the old church.

The wooden doors splinter away from him, and that shirt flies behind him, blossoming like wings. Yukhei throws his arms in front of him, wood shards raking down his wrists.

Ten doesn't look back; he cracks through the pews and scrambles up the altar. Candles fizzle out in his wake and morning is groping at the velvet sky, clambering up the kaleidoscope of the church's windows.

Ten flings an arm up, fingers flexing in acrid accusation, at the shining cross the pews bow to, the sweeping columns and gold-inlaid ceiling beams arc towards.

"You could have saved us," he spits as rainbows begin to swarm from the stained glass, washing over the bitter angles of his face. "You could have saved us all."

He whirls, sharp and beautiful, defiant as light kisses his skin so beaming and blunt. A million colors cloud his eyes, but the black shines strongest when he gazes at Yukhei.

His other arm raises, level to the first. Like lilies his fingers unfurl, shoulders smoothing. Lips and teeth moued into something reverential. "I wanted you to save me so bad," he confesses to Yukhei, voice waning into lonely adoration.

Beams of light crack through the windows, whipping across the altar. For a moment, Ten is radiant.

A serpentine trail of blood breaks free from the corner of his eye, and Yukhei thinks everything will be alright.

But the red pours denser, faster, pitiless. First from his eyes, scarlet welling over, swallowing the starlight and onyx of his irises, then through his softened lips, lavish and cruel.

His fingertips are next, cool skin opening for the tide of blood. Red braids through black where it strains through those twisting tattoos, a hundred inked stories distorting as they slop down the steps of the altar. Ten sinks to his knees and he's grinning, brilliant and sunkissed, sun- _devoured_ , laughter tumbling from his lungs as a waterfall of boiling blood.

Yukhei screams, presses further into the shadows, mouth lacerated into a primal howl, _Ten, Ten, TEN_ as black hair splashes red and he crumples forward, arms stretching down the stairs as if still reaching for Yukhei, still wanting, fingernails snagging down the gold marble. _Ten. TEN. TEN._

A hundred centuries of never-ending hunger flood from Ten's dissolving body, spilling down the aisles of the church, crashing against the pews. Blood licks at the gilded walls, lunges up Yukhei's ankles.

Yukhei moans as the sun courses through the shadows he's crouched in, hands tearing at his eyes, but this dream-body is safe and human, solid and teeming in the sun while Ten sinks into his damnation, empties himself into the channels of an abandoned church. Yukhei heaves, sobs, shivers until the storm of warm life soothes itself into a gentle sway.

On shaky legs, Yukhei rises, each step a splash then a ripple as he staggers towards the altar, where the blood still pulses sweet and true.

He falls to his hands and knees.

A heart, smooth and glossy, is tangled in the drenched gnarl of the once-white shirt.

 _Ten's_ heart. Yukhei curls over it, forehead brushing the crimson slick altar. It flutters between his palms, an abiding rhythm. The heart of a young man, not that of a lethal, ever-ravenous little god of the night.

Yukhei cradles it close, closer as it jumps and tremors, crushes it into his chest like his skin will fold around it, like his body will absorb it into his own pulse, its eternal counterpart--

He wakes, trembling.

The sun blisters high in the sky, but it is cool and dark beneath the swathes of pearl and burgundy brocade.

Yukhei nestles himself in the crooked slash of Ten's smile, buries his soul in the red-stained hollows on each side of Ten's mouth.

As sunset rips into the tender crust of the sky, Yukhei parts the curtains of the bed and collapses against the raveled silks. He falls into the gaps of Ten's side, hand vanishing between Ten's clasped ones.

He is a tendril of blood, tangled in red and slowly lowering his lips to Ten's. That dead half-smile beneath his.

Silence and stillness clot in his throat for a moment, as their heartbeats whorl into everlasting alignment. Ten drags himself from immortal slumber to twine careful fingers through Yukhei's hair, to arch delicate and adoring into Yukhei's kiss and sink deeper into the pillows, pulling Yukhei with him.

"Hunt with me tonight," Yukhei whispers, and Ten laughs, yearning, into the curve of his neck. Laughs because he doesn't know how to cry, laughs because he's forgotten how to exhale, a laugh like an infinity of hunger and wishing and waiting, expelled on the quivering edge of a heartbeat.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading <3
> 
> i'm not sure if the point of this is comprehensible whatsoever so here's my lil synopsis!
> 
> the last few scenes carry the most weight: when ten declares "you could have saved us all" he is acknowledging the evil in his existence, that despite his lost faith a part of him still resentfully believes that his soul could be 'wiped clean' if a higher power stepped in to end his immortal curse.
> 
> however, his last words are directed at yukhei: i wanted you to save me.
> 
> when his body is destroyed by the inherent holiness of light, his heart, pure and unmarred, the vessel of love, endures. showing that love is salvation in itself; no matter how broken the soul, the heart beats on. knowing it has been damned beyond his power from the day he was turned, ten's feelings for his soul are passive. he could take or leave its deliverance. but he actively wants yukhei to accept his love, therefore preserving his heart.
> 
> in the end, yukhei succumbs. he was once afraid of opening his soul to ten's sin. now, he opens his heart to love, their shared salvation.
> 
> all deeds forgiven in the act of reverence.


End file.
